Customer Engagement: Where Are the Data-Driven Insights?

As marketing channels continue to rapidly evolve, so too has the role of the chief marketing officer. So what does the future-centric CMO look like? According to a new SAP white paper titled “The DNA of a Growth CMO,” the key growth drivers of this future movement are customer engagement and data-driven insights. Never before have these traits been more important in Business-to-Business.

“Customer engagement: Reflected in the organization’s ability to understand the consumer – a first step towards engagement and marketing’s custody of the customer experience and the continuous value exchange between customers and the company.”

“Data-driven insights: The ability to extract insights from data and apply them to diverse marketing activities in support of business goals.”

Yet in the B-to-B world, data-driven insights are still proving to be a challenge. Often the challenge is the result of the siloed nature of companies where marketing and sales are in their own worlds and do not share data. So without insight, it is difficult to impact customer engagement in a meaningful way.

How Can Current Customers Help Marketers with Generating New Customers?
By understanding current customers and their degree of loyalty to a business, a company can begin to create profiles for good, better and best customer types. Ultimately, marketing can use the insights to target customers with a similar profile and set of needs.

Current Customer Data Is the Key to Better Insights
One of the challenges many B-to-B companies have is generating insights from data. The challenge is often little to no data to analyze. Even with marketing automation programs being used more and more as a way to collect useful data, the timeline to collect enough data to turn it into meaningful insights can be long.

One data resource that is typically untapped by marketing is current customer data. Much of this data is financial. While it may be a little messy to sort through it, this existing customer data can prove to be a way to define initial customer segments (good, better, best). Once the financial segmentation has been completed, qualitative research can flush out the segmentation profiles to gain more insight into how current customers rate a company’s day-to-day performance and how a company compares to its competitors.

In the end, this data-collection process gives a marketer insight into how customer needs vary by segment, gaps that exist in performance between the company and customer segments, and insight into how the company fares against competitors. These combined insights enable marketers to create actionable programs to retain customers as well as provide insights into how to communicate to potential best customers.

Learn more must-haves to B-to-B success. Register for the October 29 gyro/Loyalty Research Center webinar, “The Growth CMO: Real Customer Insights Driving Tangible Results,” to learn about a customer valuation model using customer intelligence data you may already have available to drive insights that can make lead generation and customer retention measurable.

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Carolyn Ladd – Vice President of Account Planning, gyro Cincinnati

As an account planner, Carolyn is responsible conducting research projects, developing strategic insights, facilitating ideation sessions and workshops related to process improvement, new product development, campaign strategy, defining analytics and metrics for clients, and working with agency teams to develop campaign strategies and tactics that resonate with customers.

Carolyn’s first foray in business was with Thoughtware Inc., a pioneer in interactive learning and integrated support systems. The job at Thoughtware led Carolyn to realize that she thrives as a strategic planner and consultant. Her strong sense of curiosity, superb listening skills, solid facilitation acumen and the innate ability to distill complex ideas into simple messages were crucial to her role. As she says, “I’m always at my best when working with the unknown. I enjoy taking all the pieces of the puzzle and putting it together.”

Carolyn has been working with the world’s top brands for over 20 years. She has conducted complex research that drives brand messaging and tactical planning. She has developed segmentation programs for B-to-B companies that rely on brokers, deals and/or distributors to sell their products and solutions. Carolyn is passionate about leveraging digital strategy and tactics to drive results. At gyro, she is one of the leaders in digital marketing communications.